As skyscrapers increasingly replaced low-rise housing on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, the cityscape changed radically. The east side of Washington Street (where most of the Syrians lived) and the west side of Greenwich Street were the last of the old housing stock. This last remnant was destroyed in the mid-1940s by the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel; today the air intake shaft for the tunnel sits on the corner of Washington Street and Battery Place and the rest of the street was destroyed to build the tunnel's entrance.